Today at Commission, double duty and merger silence

Things are heating up in Brussels ahead of the Rome summit at the end of March.

As Playbook revealed Monday morning, the college of commissioners will meet twice this week — late Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. Margaritis Schinas, the Commission’s chief spokesman, confirmed this at the midday briefing.

“You can guess what you can guess,” Schinas told reporters when asked if Jean-Claude Juncker will present the Commission’s long-awaited White Paper on the EU’s future at the Wednesday meeting. That seems a roundabout way of saying “Yes.”

Speaking of the EU’s future, Schinas confirmed the Commission will not be represented next Monday in Versailles when French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and Italian PM Paolo Gentiloni meet to discuss what’s next for the Continent.

Schinas said Juncker had held meetings or had phone calls with all those leaders in recent days.

All quiet on the merger front

News of the day was the announcement that the London Stock Exchange may be having doubts about its proposed €29 billion merger with Deutsche Börse.

The LSE said just before the midday press conference that the Commission’s demands — including that it sell its majority stake in MTS, an Italian platform for trading bonds — “made no sense.”

“We have no comment,” said Ricardo Cardoso, the Commission’s spokesman for competition. “Our assessment is ongoing.”